About Us

Interior Design Business Academy supports entrepreneurial designers and decorators with a unique mix of proven design business systems and tools to have the lifestyles and businesses they love.

Over the years, IDBA has helped thousands of interior designs develop creative businesses that pay them what they’re worth through inspirational and educational seminars, webinars, coaching sessions, retreats and business tools.

Terri’s Story

Terri became a serious Interior Designer when she suddenly found herself in the middle of a divorce.

She’d been a stay-at-home mom, working part-time in her husband’s real estate business, and the reality of parenting her five-year-old daughter by herself (and not having a job) was very real and very scary.

So, Terri did what she does best … found solutions.

She quickly accepted a commission based job at a high-end furniture store design studio in Tucson, AZ. There was little to no financial security at this studio, since the tiny draw was less than her mortgage payment. But Terri believed she had a creative gift and that her life’s work was to share it with the world – so she took the leap of faith and began learning the “furniture store” process of giving away her time and ideas in order to sell furniture.

Every day she hoped a customer would walk into the store and ask her to create something significant and wonderful.

Unfortunately, hoping didn’t get her those great clients and nobody wanted to help.

Her coworkers acted as if there was a secret to the business of interior design and and no one was going to share it with her.

She also realized there was no “instruction book” on how to attract clients and found herself at another crossroads; either give up and get a job at a drug store makeup counter OR figure out the business side of interior design.

Terri chose option #2 and made the commitment that design was her life career. She began chasing down every lead she could get her hands on and passed the NCIDQ. She also started doing a million little jobs – worked long hours, made mistakes, and learned from them all.

The first major step came when the furniture store started photographing her work and using it for their advertising. This lead to Terri winning her very first local ASID chapter’s Design Excellence Award. The store continued to showcase her work and soon more of her projects were published in local and national Interiors Magazines.

Then came the fateful day that the furniture store manager came to Terri and told her she HAD to sell pink sleeper sofas, because the store had bought too many and needed to get rid of them quickly.

That did it!

Terri decided she couldn’t take it anymore and made the leap to go out on her own. Even though she had a tween at home, a mortgage, and a new car payment – she knew that the time had come and she HAD to decide what kind of future she wanted to create for herself and her daughter.

She started marketing to her ideal clients, creating systems for selling design services, and writing letters of agreement and proposals. She even created a system for specifying, pricing, selling, ordering, tracking and delivering merchandise.

Terri couldn’t believe it – she’d started having more time to spend with her daughter, no longer worried about paying bills, and was having fun!

She quickly created a backroom system and developed staff to help her grow a multi million business. Her roster of clients included model homes, luxury residential, and commercial projects. The cherry on top came when she won the ASID National Award of Design Excellence within 5 years of starting on her own.

Her reputation started to grow and she found her phone ringing off the hook from fellow designers looking for help in crafting contracts and capturing new jobs.

She was happy to help and after her daughter graduated from Design School, Terri felt like it was time again to make a change and created Interior Design Business Academy.

If you’re an interior designer and decorator facing the same struggles she had those years ago, you can bypass the hard times and mistakes, and start having the life and business you’ve dreamed about and love!

Why Terri Talks About Money

My journey to understand my relationship with money all started with flipping a house (long before that phrase was coined).

I purchased a small house with a cash advance from a credit card (not a good practice, don’t do this. I was very young, foolish and obviously fearless) and quickly learned to glaze windows, lay floor tile, strip old paint off good millwork…you name it, I was a one woman, do it all, fix it up show!

Things took off from there and by the time I was 26, I owned several hundred apartments, a couple office buildings and a strip shopping center. I was living in a custom built home (that I designed and furnished from the ground up) in the Tucson Foothills overlooking the city lights, had high-end cars and clothes, weekends in Vegas once a month.!

You can imagine my total surprise when seemingly overnight the national economy tanked in 1985 and all those properties began losing money every month.

The writing was on the wall and there was no way that I could hold on to this lifestyle, but I wasn’t ready to let go and thought if I waited long enough everything would be fine.

But I ended up losing it all; the properties, cars, and my marriage.

Fast forward a decade and I’d used my years and experience gained from working at a high end studio in a furniture store to launch my own design studio, passed the NCIDQ, won a lot of local ASID chapter design awards and a national one too in 2000.

A phone call from a local marketing manager lead me to “accidentally” discover national homebuilders (and the very lucrative model home business), and I soon became the “go to” design studio for most of the builders in Southern Arizona.

The model home contracts quickly built a substantial business and I was able to put my daughter through college, pay for a wedding, buy and remodel (of course) several amazing ranch properties where I happily kept my horses.

Life was sweet.

And then the economy came crashing down again. Each week another one of my model subdivisions closed down, there were no new model contracts to go after, and I became very scared of what was going to happen to my business and staff of 12.

I’d lay in bed and ask myself, “why had I worked so hard and do so well to eventually just have it all come crashing down?”

It was then I decided to not let this crash take me down like the last time. I needed to take action, but wasn’t sure what to do first.

I started reading, researching, asking questions, finding gurus to teach me about money and what I learned was my inherited money beliefs were running my financial life.

I had enough… I examined and let go of old beliefs that were no longer serving me. Beliefs I had gained when I was a child and were ultimately holding me back from a life filled with abundance, ease and prosperity that I deserved.

I applied the universal laws of manifestation, paying attention to my mindset and keeping it consistently positive, as well as asking for what I wanted and expecting it to show up.

And voila, my life quickly started changing in very positive ways.

I started trusting that there is a plenty of everything waiting for me, happily celebrating when it appears, sharing it generously with my employees, my family, and with people who helped me and others who need help.

I navigated through the recession without losing my money, property and business, and create Design Biz Blueprint in the process!

The stress, scarcity and suffering I was creating because of my negative relationship with money is gone and is now replaced with prosperity, abundance and joy.